Eyes of the Face

A computer is a wondrous tool, but playing with a wondrous tool is not the same as using it to build visual art. The eyes can see the difference.

Timeless visual art can be seen with the eyes of the face, the eyes of the mind, and the eyes of the heart.

The eyes of the face understand only the language of light, shape, composition, direction, depth, and form. These eyes cannot see intention. These eyes do not know process, the steps of construction. Nor do they resolve the methodology, the affiliation, the reference, the ism, the hat-tip, the political angle, or sincerity or artifice. Eyes do not flinch at flashes of genius – for the flash occurred during the creation and is now gone forever. Eyes can see only a residual scorch upon the canvas, if it exists. Eyes can see this poetry. Blind are these eyes to gender roles, to multiculturalism, to world hunger, to plague and scourge, to estrus, feces or whatever else may have been gratuitously offered up to appeal to the taste of the curator or critic. Taste cannot be seen by these eyes. Such vision requires the eyes of the heart to feel the outline, to understand the image as human experience. Or the eyes of the mind to deconstruct the shades of light and dark into the foreign grammar and semantics of the intellect, to translate roughly into ideas, into trends and topics; a psychic reading a stranger’s palm.

Art in the late 20th century and now the 21st has spurned the eyes of the face and appeals instead to the eyes of the mind and heart. And so we stand and look and look and squint and strain – and see nothing with the eyes of our face. Some walk away disillusioned. Some think that they must not be looking properly – that their eyes are flawed or unworthy and they demand: “Tell us what to see! Tell us what to think and feel about what we see!”